How to Hide Notifications on Mac While Sharing Screen or At Other Times

Just like iPhone or iPad, Mac is also equipped to push instant notifications from iMessage’s, Skype chat, Google Hangouts or another application that uses Apple’s system. Push notifications can take an embarrassing turn while you are busily screen sharing on Mac, giving a presentation to a classroom full of students or having your software repaired using a remote connection, and then a notification pops up that you do not want others to read. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix to this. Here we have mentioned how to hide notifications on Mac while sharing screen on Mac and other ways to turn them off irrespective of screen sharing.

What is a Mac Screen Share?

A Mac screen share is more like a remote desktop, where you can view, access, delete, turn on/turn off another computer. The level of access given to this other person that you are connected to can be decided at your end. You can either set a strong password or choose not to.

While the screen sharing option is enabled, you can have your computer fixed remotely, as far as the fault is completely software-related.

How to Set up and Use Screen Sharing on macOS Sierra

1. Choose Apple menu, then System Preferences, then click Sharing.

2. Select the Screen Sharing checkbox.

3. Deselect all of the other options that do not apply here, such as Remote Management, file sharing, etc.

4. Specify who can share your screen owing to the following two options- ‘All user’s or ‘Only these users.’

5. Add users from network groups or other users who have access to your Mac to allow screen sharing from their respective user accounts.

Additional options for screen sharing are available on Computer Settings.

Alternatively, you can also have someone else share their Mac screen with you.

Disable Notifications While Screen Sharing on Mac

While notifications are meant ‘for your eyes only,’ it is essential to hide them during an event you are using your precious Mac for screen sharing purposes. Lucky for you, this is easily fixed.

For Mac, there is an app that allows silencing notifications during screen sharing, it is called Muzzle. As the name suggests, it muzzles all notifications appearing on your screen while the screen sharing is active. It also works with Slack, Join Me, Google Hangouts, Skype, Google Duo, etc.

After downloading it you need to allow the app access to Accessibility on your Mac.

On opening Muzzle, it will be shown on the Menu bar of the screen.

There are two alternative options which remove the push notifications whether you’re sharing the screen or not.

Hide Notifications on Mac

In the menu bar, you will see three horizontal lines at the extreme right, use the combination ‘Option + click’ on the icon to turn this off.

Doing so will turn it to gray and silence any application that uses Apple’s system from pushing notifications. By default, these notifications remain off for half a day and turn back on automatically afterward. You can use the same combination on the 3 lines icon to turn it back on.

There are apps such as Microsoft Outlook that do not use Apple’s system and therefore, its notification system needs to be turned off at the application-level only.

Turn Off Push Notifications For Certain Mac Apps

An alternative to this would be to go to System Preferences by clicking the Apple menu, and going to Notifications, and then choosing which of the listed apps you do not want to notify. Here, you can also choose the time & date when you want notifications to remain off.

We hope that this tutorial gave you enough options to disable notifications on Mac which comes in so handy while sharing the screen. Which one are you going to use? Let us know in the comments.

Hemant Mendiratta is a Passionate Blogger and keeps a keen eye on useful apps and gadgets. Enthusiastic about helping and empowering users with Tech related stuff. Absolutely loves running and goes for a run whenever he feels tired.
You can connect with him on: